The route

I’ve been spending the rainy days pouring over maps, studying the guide books and reading ride reports on www.horizonsunlimited.com/hubb/, plotting routes around the countries we’ll be visiting and making notes of places to visit. We’re not usually as prepared as this, normally we just get on the bike and ride, but it’s given me something to do while the weather is too wet to get the bike out.

This map shows a simplified version of our proposed route in red. Previous bike trips are in blue and black (rough approximations of routes taken). There will be lots of detours and diversions to see the sights. Whether we stick to the plan depends on the weather and other factors and if I we really like a place we’ll hang around for longer. France we’ve been to on a motorcycle twice before, so we’ll probably shoot through there pretty quickly, though we’ll definitely see the MotoGP race at Le Mans. Hotel near Le Mans already booked.

Early preparation
It’s been 10 months since our last long trip on a motorcycle, but we’ll get a chance to get back into the swing of things in a couple of weeks’ time when we go to the National AGM of the Ulysses Club which is being held in Mildura, about 900 km away. It will give us some practice in packing our gear into one pannier each. While we’ll only be away for a week, we shall need just as many clothes etc. as we’ll be carrying for 7 weeks in Europe. The luggage space on the different bikes is about the same, so it will be a realistic test.

I’m reasonably ride fit as I do at least 35,000 to 45,000 km each year on my bikes and two weekends ago I accompanied a friend on a 1600 km in 24 hours Iron Butt Ride. We managed to do 1666 km in about 22 hours, so my backside is well and truly broken in. We’ll be doing about 7,000 km in Europe so it should be an easy ride, with time for lots of touristy stuff, though the terrain will be very different.

We’ve had a lot of rain here recently. Our place was isolated by floodwaters for a day last week and a landslide 10 km out of the village has cut the main road out for at least a month, which will affect our route to Mildura.

Now it’s raining heavily again. Not the weather for motorcycling at the moment. Hopefully the roads to Mildura will be free of flooding at the time we go.

Whoops!

Oh dear, I’m in trouble. I set up this blog and have been playing with it while it’s been pouring with rain for the past few days and while my lovely wife has been away in Canberra. I sent the URL to some of the kids so they could review it and give me their opinions. They all love it, though one of them did suggest I shouldn’t show it to Gail until we get back from Turkey. Perhaps she was right – I’m in trouble for referring to us as Old Farts. Too late now - I’ll just have to put up with the flack.

Please note: The lady on the left is not an Old Fart.

(Photo taken on a bridge in Slovenia over a river obviously named after her.)

Gear & Coomunications Update

On previous trips we've written a daily log in a notebook and communicated with our kids by phone and/or by finding internet cafes and sending emails. Last year in particular the spread of wifi became really evident by the scarcity of internet cafes in countries as different as Ireland and Iran. It became obvious that we had to update.

Another issue was the number of bulky books that we had to carry with us. We are both avid readers, so we had 2 or 3 novels in our baggage along with a couple of Lonely Planet guides. Those books weigh a few kilos and take up a lot of space.

This year, instead of the books we'll take a Kindle each (the model with wifi and free 3G) so we can download new books as necessary  during our journey. On my recently acquired Kindle I have already downloaded the Lonely Planet Guide to Mediterranean Europe at a fraction of the price of the paper version and a copy of a guide to Tokyo as we'll be having a 3 night stoppover there on our way to Europe.

Our main means of communication will be via an Asus Netbook that I bought a couple of days ago. In a protective case it's no bulkier than just one large Lonely Planet guide and the intention is that I'll use the free wifi at hotels and cafes to update this blog (instead of keeping a paper diary) and receive and send emails.

I intially felt a bit guilty about taking my business away from bookshops and abandoning the book exchange facilities at hotels and hostels, but none of the bookshops I've visited had a copy of the Guide to Med Europe and to be honest the books in overseas book exchanges are inevitably crap and/or have pages missing. By using wifi I might be adding another nail to the coffins of internet cafes but what I am doing is a reaction to a situation that already exists - if I can't find them anymore I have no real alternative.

Each year for several years now my wife Gail and I have done an overseas motorcycle trip. The exception was 3 or 4 years ago when she insisted that we did a trip that didn't involve motorcycles. Part of her argument was that she wanted to do something "safer". So where did she take me? To Egypt to see the pyramids and to Uganda to see the mountain gorillas. At that time Egypt was still firmly under the control of its President of several decades and was very safe for tourists; but Uganda? One week before we were due to head off to Uganda I had a look at the Aussie Government's website that gives travel advice. "Do not travel near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, particularly the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, because of the risk of armed incursions by rebels and the risk of kidnap". What! Isn't it Bwindi Impenetrable Forest where we're going camping? Of course we had a great time and we weren't kidnapped, but it made it tricky for her to sustain an argument that motorcycle travel is always more dangerous than the alternatives.

In 2011 we bought a 1994 Honda ST 1100 (known in the UK and Europe as a Pan European - a strange name to my Aussie ear as it sounds like an insult to Europeans!) on UK ebay with the assistance of a friend in England who was kind enough to then collect it and garage it until we arrived there. I used it to go to the Isle of Man TT motorbike races and then Gail and I toured Ireland and Scotland. The bike is currently in my friend's garage again waiting for us to return for our 2012 trip.

The plan for May/June 2012 is to take the Portsmouth to Caen ferry to France, see the Le Mans MotoGP motorbike races, ride to Marseille and then ferry hop to Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, mainland Italy, Greece, ride into Turkey and tour around, and then return to Athens where we'll sell the bike and then fly home. Through the Horizons Unlimited website (www.horizonsunlimited.com) we have arranged to sell it to a Scotsman who will meet us in Athens and then ride it home via eastern Europe. Flights are booked and a rough itinerary worked out.

Keep posted as the details are firmed up. What to take? Where to go? Will the eventuality turn out to be anything like the plan?